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Penélope Cruz Sánchez; born April 28, 1974) is a Spanish actress and model. Signed by an agent at age 15, she made her acting debut at 16 on television and her feature film debut the following year in Jamón, jamón (1992), to critical acclaim. Her subsequent roles in the 1990s and 2000s included Open Your Eyes (1997), The Hi-Lo Country (1999), The Girl of Your Dreams (2000) and Woman on Top (2000). Cruz achieved recognition for her lead roles in the 2001 films Vanilla Sky and Blow.

She has since built a successful career, appearing in films from a range of genres, including the comedy Waking Up in Reno (2002), the thriller Gothika (2003), the Christmas movie Noel (2004), and the action adventure Sahara (2005). She has received critical acclaim for her roles in Volver (2006) and Nine (2009) receiving Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for each. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2008 for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She was the first Spanish actress in history to receive an Academy Award and the first Spanish actress to receive a star at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Airplane! (titled Flying High! in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, and the Philippines) is a 1980 American satirical comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and released by Paramount Pictures.

It stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty and features Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lorna Patterson. The film is a parody of the disaster film genre, particularly the 1957 Paramount film Zero Hour!, which it follows fairly closely, with superficial changes.

Airplane! was a financial success, grossing over US$83 million in North America alone, against a budget of just $3.5 million.

John Phillips (November 13, 1914, Bouïra, Algeria – August 22, 1996, Manhattan, New York City) was a photographer for Life magazine from the 1930s to the 1950s who was known for his war photographs.

He was hired by Life in 1936 and his first assignment was to cover Edward VIII’s opening of Parliament. His pictures were included in the magazine’s first issue (on November 23, 1936) and he went on to cover many events of the Second World War.

John Phillips has been described as the “grand-godfather of photo-journalism, a master of lenses and multiple languages; elegant, exuberant and chrome-steel effectual, who has recorded in his own peripatetic way some of the freshest footprints of history.”

The U.S. nuclear arsenal is too big, too expensive, out of date and desperately needs to be re-thought, according to retired MARINE General James Cartwright and retired U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering.

Pickering and Cartwright met with the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development on Wednesday in a hearing about our nuclear arsenal, which was built decades ago to protect this country from a range of threats it no longer faces. Now, the antiquated system is costing the country money and placing it at risk, said the two men, and a time has come to take steps to modernize the weapons system.

Cartwright, who is a chairman of the nuclear disarmament commission Global Zero, was presenting the Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission’s report, which calls upon the U.S. and Russia to reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals by 80 percent to 900 nuclear weapons each.

The proposal outlined in the report calls for a “reduced and de-alerted” nuclear force:

– one with modernized technology

– shortened response times

– ultimately spends $120 BILLION less over the next decade.

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The idea of restructuring the nuclear arsenal dates back decades. Ronald Reagan (remember him?) made it part of his agenda at his Reykjavík Summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986.

Rubin said that until recently, the issue has always been a bipartisan one. It was only in 2010, when President Obama signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) that Republicans began to argue more vociferously against arms control agreements.

“That was when partisanship crept into the debate,” said Rubin, “The treaty was a major accomplishment, the entirety of the Republican foreign policy establishment was saying, ‘We needed this treaty.’” It was the United States’ best opportunity since the expiration of the previous arms control treaty with Russia to verify exactly what weapons Russia had and what it was doing with them.

But as Cartwright said on Wednesday morning before the panel, our defense stance is no longer based on a “bipolar relationship” with Russia. ”We live in a multipolar nuclear capable world,” he said, and our refusal to update our notions of defense is costing the country billions of dollars and eroding the stability of our position in the world.

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The global security situation has changed profoundly since our nation’s defenses were designed, he said, ”Weneed to live in this reality.”